66 FICTION THE SUN, THE MOON, THE STAR.S . , r /, /" not a bad guy. I know how that sounds- defensive, unscrupulous-but it's true. I'm like everybody else: weak, :full of mis- takes, but basically good. Magdalena dis- agrees. She considers me a typical Do- minican man: a sucio, an asshole. See, many months ago, when Magda was still my girl, when I didn't have to be careful about almost everything, I cheated on her with this chick who had tons of eighties free- style hair. Didn't tell Magda about it, ei- ther. You know how it is. A smelly bone like that, better off buried in the back yard of your life. Magda only found out because homegirl wrote her a fucking let- ter. And the letter had details. Shit you wouldn't even tell your boys drunk. The thing is, that particular bit of stu- pidity had been over for months. Me and Magda were on an upswing. We weren't as distant as we'd been the winter I was cheating. The freeze was over. She was coming over to my place and instead of us hanging with my knucklehead boys- me smoking, her bored out of her skull- we were seeing movies. Driving out to different places to eat. Even caught a play at the Crossroads and I took her picture with some bigwig black play- wrights, pictures where she's smiling so much you'd think her wide-ass mouth was going to unhinge. We were a couple again. Visiting each other's family on the weekends. Eating breakfast at diners hours before anybody else was up, rum- maging through the New Brunswick li- brary together, the one Carnegie built with his guilt money. A nice rhythm we Ifshe's all that, what can go wrong? BY JUNOT DIAZ had going. But then the Letter hits like a "Star Trek" grenade and detonates every- thing, past, present, future. Suddenly her folks want to kill me It don't matter that I helped them with their taxes two years running or that I mow their lawn. Her father, who used to treat me like his hijo, calls me an asshole on the phone, sounds like he's strangling himself with the cord. "You no deserve I speak to you in Spanish," he says. I see one of Magda's girlfriends at the Woodbridge Mall-Claribel, the ecuatoriana with the biology degree and the chinita eyes-and she treats me like I ate somebody's kid. You don't even want to hear how it went down with Magda. Like a five-train colli- sion. She threw Cassandràs letter at me-- it missed and landed under a Volvo-and then she sat down on the curb and started hyperventilating. "Oh, God," she wailed. "Oh, my God." This is when my boys claim they would have pulled a Total Fucking Denial. Cas- sandra who? I was too sick to my stom- ach even to t I sat down next to her, grabbed her flailing arms, and said some dumb shit like "You have to listen to me, Magda. Or you won't understand." TIT me tell you something about Magda. L She's a Bergenline original: short with big eyes and big hips and dark curly hair you could lose a hand in. Her father's a baker, her mother sells kids' clothes door to door. She's a forgiving soul. A Catholic. Dragged me into church every Sunday for Spanish Mass, and when one of her relatives is sick, especially the ones in C ba, she writes letters to some nuns in Pennsylvania, asks the sisters to pray for her family. She's the nerd every li- brarian in town knows, a teacher whose students fall in love with her. Always cutting shit out for me from the news- papers, Dominican shit. I see her like, what, every week, and she still sends me corny little notes in the mail: "So you won't forget me." You couldn't think of anybody worse to screw than Magda. I won't bore you with the details. The beggIng, the crawling over glass, the cry- ing. Let's just say that after two weeks of this, of my driving out to her house, sending her letters, and calling her at all hours of the night, we put it back to- gether. Didn't mean I ever ate with her family again or that her girlfriends were celebrating. Those cabronas, they were like, No,jamás, never. Even Magda wasn't too hot on the rapprochement at first, but I had the momentum of the past on my side. When she asked me "Whv don't .I you leave me alone?" I told her the truth: "It's because I love you, mami." I know this sounds like a load of doo-doo, but it's true: Magdàs my heart. I didn't want her to leave me; I wasn't about to start looking for a girlfriend because I'd fucked up one lousy time. Don't think it was a cakewalk, be- cause it wasn't. Magda's stubborn; back when we first started dating, she said she wouldn't sleep with me until we'd been together at least a month, and home- girl stuck to it, no matter how hard I tried to get into her knickknacks. She s sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper. You can't imagine how many times she asked (especially after we finished fucking), "Were you ever going to tell me?" This and "Why?" were her favorite questions. My favorite "V" d " I . d answers were .L es an t was a stu pI mistake." We even had some conversation about Cassandra-usually in the dark, when we couldn't see each other. Magda asked me if I'd loved Cassandra and I told her no, I didn't. "Do you still think about her?" "Nope." "Did you like fucking her " "To be honest, baby; it was lous " And for a while after we got back together every- thing was as fine as it could be. But what was strange was that instead of shit improving between us, things got worse and worse. My Magda was turn- ing into another Magda. Who didn t want to sleep over as much or scratch my back when I asked her to. Amazing how